What Carrie Coon says about shooting ‘The White Lotus’ in Thailand
“The White Lotus” star Carrie Coon tells USA TODAY about what it was like to film in Thailand.
Spoiler alert: This story includes details of “The White Lotus” season finale.
WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. − If the third-season finale of HBO’s “The White Lotus” seemed sad, the actors who spent seven months playing them in Thailand would likely agree.
The April 6 finale (streaming now on Max) featured five deaths, four more than in each of the past two seasons. One of them was Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), the toothy girlfriend of Rick (Walton Goggins), who perished from a gunshot fired by a newly emboldened Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), the Thailand resort’s security guard.At a panel following a finale watch party here, Wood was teary, taking sips of water. “It looked exactly how it felt,” she said of filming the finale. “There’s a lot in that episode that makes me … sob.”
As Thapthimthong spoke about Gaitok’s decision to shoot (urged by Sritala, the resort owner), Wood interjected: “He’s a lover, not a fighter!” to cheers from the assembled crowd at the Four Seasons Hotel, the swanky chain whose properties hosted all three seasons of the hit HBO comedy murder mystery. Wood, 31, called the finale “very, very moving,” and despite the tragedy, “there was a lot of hope in it, and there was a lot of softness,” she said. “I found it incredibly uncynical, but especially for ‘The White Lotus.’
“Obviously, being the one that dies, this whole time, I’ve been like, so sad,” she said, adding that initially she was upset that creator/writer/director Mike White offed Chelsea, the season’s beacon of positivity.
“Mike kills hope! Because Chelsea is hope, and he kills her,” she thought. But after watching the entire 90-minute finale Sunday, she changed her mind: “What I saw just then was like, there was so much love in it!”
How might Chelsea’s vacation pal Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon), the partner of sketchy Greg/Gary (Jon Gries), have reacted to the death? Though we never saw it, Le Bon theorized “she cried really, really hard for maybe five minutes. And then she decided to numb herself” with alcohol and sex, “because that’s what she does.””That’s my girl!,” Gries responded, which sparked laughter in the roomAnd what about Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook), whose troubled family trekked from North Carolina to indulge her secret wish to join a Buddhist monastery, only to change her mind as her mom Victoria (Parker Posey) predicted? “I guess she is her mother’s daughter,” Hook said. “I guess she also needs a lorazepam right now. … I couldn’t be happier for her.”
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